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katherineharron

Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David H... - 0 views

  • Video of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday amid an uproar over newly surfaced comments she made in 2018 and 2019
  • In the video from March 2019, Greene follows Hogg as he walks toward the US Capitol. She can be heard making false and baseless claims as she asks him a series of questions related to gun rights and how he was able to meet with senators
  • "He's a coward," Greene says at the end of the video as Hogg walks away, claiming his activism was funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is often the subject of far-right conspiracy theories, and other liberals.
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  • Greene -- who has previously called Hogg "#littleHitler" -- said in a written statement to CNN that the video was taken while she was in Washington, "going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing."
  • "In 11th grade, one of my fellow student took our school hostage with a gun he brought to our 'gun-free' school," Greene said. "I understand that fear firsthand and I will always work to protect our gun rights so that Americans can defend themselves and others against bad people intent to harm or kill them."
  • The video reemerged one day after CNN's KFile reported that Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.
  • In one post, from January 2019, Greene liked a comment that said "a bullet to the head would be quicker" to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In other posts, Greene liked comments about executing FBI agents who, in her eyes, were part of the "deep state" working against Trump.
  • A commenter asked Greene, "Now do we get to hang them ?? Meaning H & O ???," referring to Obama and Hillary Clinton.Greene replied, "Stage is being set. Players are being put in place. We must be patient. This must be done perfectly or liberal judges would let them off."
  • "Over the years, I've had teams of people manage my pages. Many posts have been liked. Many posts have been shared. Some did not represent my views. Especially the ones that CNN is about to spread across the internet," she wrote. Greene did not specify whether she or a member of her team were behind the posts reviewed by CNN's KFile.
  • "My message to Kevin McCarthy is, take all of her committee assignments away ... also, don't support her when she runs for re-election again and try to get her primaried. If you say this is not your party, actually call it out and hold her accountable," he said.
anniina03

Joe Biden releases labor plan in middle-class pitch - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a plan Friday that aims to protect workers' rights and to strengthen unions and collective bargaining efforts as he tries to persuade voters he's the best presidential candidate to fight for the labor community.
  • The 11-page proposal hits President Donald Trump as engaging in a "war on organizing, collective bargaining, unions, and workers" and seeks to "check the abuse of corporate power over labor." It calls for legislation enacting stricter penalties on corporations and holding corporate executives personally accountable for violating labor laws or interfering with organizing efforts.
  • The plan aims to implement policies to encourage unionization, guard workers' pay and benefits, and provide workplace protections
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  • Strong unions are an essential element to building a strong middle class."
  • The policy, which was crafted with input from a number of unions, comes as the former vice president is looking to shore up support among the labor community.
  • Under his policy, Biden promises to enact legislation that would make classifying workers as independent contractors a violation of the law.
  • Biden would also bar employers who illegally oppose unions from bidding for federal contracts for a set period -- a policy enacted during the Obama administration.
  • Two of Biden's rivals, Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have also presented themselves as champions of the working class. Biden's proposal mirrors those of his competitors to the left in many ways, including increasing the minimum wage to $15 and making it easier for workers to strike.
anniina03

What's Wrong With Saying War Is 'Normal' in the Middle East | Time - 0 views

  • n the days of tension that have followed the U.S. airstrike that took out Iran’s Gen. Qasem Soleimani, an old trope about the Middle East has reared its ugly head. On Wednesday on Fox News, former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated it when she claimed that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.”
  • This trope is frequently turned to by those who would have the world believe that war in the Middle East is somehow innate and inevitable. But a look at the history of the region reveals that it’s simply not true. People in the Middle East haven’t “been killing each other” at any rate that exceeds average human levels of conflict. Indeed, the region that lays claim to being the “cradle of civilization” had developed quite, well, civilized and complex systems of compromise and coexistence that allowed its diverse peoples, faiths and ethnic groups to live together over very long periods of time.
  • In fact, imperial systems like those that ruled the Middle East for most of its history — spanning vast swathes of the globe and encompassing an immense diversity of ethnicities, faith traditions and customs — have of pragmatic necessity had to develop systems of accommodation, ways to avoid war.
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  • Even the Mongols, famed for their brutality in conquest, realized the necessity for coexistence. In the 13th century, after creating the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, they established the “Pax Mongolica” — the Mongol Peace — that guaranteed religious freedom to all Mongol subjects.
  • As war has devastated Syria­­­­­­­ in the past nine years, the conflict has taken on an overtly sectarian dimension, and it’s not uncommon for observers to issue fatalistic comments along the lines of K.T. McFarland’s. Sectarian conflict has been said to date back 1,400 years to the founding of Islam, and we frequently hear, as Fox news viewers did this week, that somehow people in the region are irrational, stubbornly embroiled in ancient conflicts and unable to join the modern world. There were sectarian identities in the medieval era, of course, and these sometimes led to conflict. But the intensity of current sectarian cleavages is a surprisingly recent development, effectively beginning with the arrival of European political modernity and only made worse by the post-WWII rise of the authoritarian Arab state. Later, tensions were aggravated by the Lebanese Civil War and by the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, which remade its sectarian landscape.
Javier E

Coronavirus Relief Also Has Biggest Climate Bill in History - 0 views

  • How big a deal are the climate provisions? The World Resources Institute has called the bill “one of the most significant pieces of climate legislation that Congress has passed in its history.”
  • The major provisions include: a $35 billion investment in new zero-emission energy technology (including solar, wind, nuclear, and carbon-capture storage); an extension of tax credits for wind and solar energy, which were set to expire; and, most significantly, a plan for phasing out hydrofluorocarbons, a small but extremely potent greenhouse gas used as a coolant.
  • the amount of good climate policy in this bill is shocking
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  • “This is perhaps the most significant climate legislation Congress has ever passed.”
  • In 2016, the Obama administration committed to an international agreement to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs. The Trump administration, as you’d expect, renounced the agreement and then proposed rolling back regulations on HFCs. Instead, the president will sign a bill that would allow the United States to fulfill the terms of the treaty he renounced. A full international HFC phaseout will reduce global warming by nearly one degree Fahrenheit.
  • Manufacturers of heating and cooling units prefer a single, strict national standard than a patchwork of lax but variable state-based standards, just like car-makers do. The industry has lobbied for a national standard.
  • The larger lesson here is that, in the modern era, constructive legislation is still possible — as long as the issue stays below the radar. High-profile policy fights tend to become grist for right-wing media,
katherineharron

Jimmy Carter to Joe Biden: How Georgia got to the center of the US political universe -... - 0 views

  • Georgia may feel teleported to the center of the US political universe, but its emergence as a swing state has been a long time coming.
  • One of the five Southern states that voted for the segregationist George Wallace in 1968, it joins Virginia as one of two Southern states to oppose Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
  • It was a sophisticated turnout operation that awoke more than 150,000 more votes in the urban Atlanta region in 2020 compared to 2016 and, separately, rapidly growing suburbs fed up with Trump's brand of conservatism. It's a quickly growing population, and a diversifying one, that responded to those efforts. Atlanta is a capitol of Black American culture and the state has seen a massive influx of Latinos.
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  • After nearly three decades supporting Republican presidential candidates -- the last Democrat Georgia supported was Bill Clinton in 1992 -- its vote for Biden seemed like a surprise, but it came after a remarkable grassroots campaign to get new voters to the polls and years of demographic shifts that have created a more diverse population.
  • Barack Obama turned two previously red southern states blue in 2008. But while Virginia has stayed in the Democratic column in each successive presidential election and now seems as reliably blue as any other US state, North Carolina veered back to Republicans, although it has remained at the top of Democrats' target list.
  • The outcome of the twin Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5 will hold some indication and test the turnout operation Stacey Abrams undertook with her organization The New Georgia Project after she narrowly lost the 2018 governor's race there.
  • "We have seen dramatic turnout among communities that typically are not at the top of mind for candidates. We have seen them be engaged, be encouraged and we have seen them turn out," Abrams told CNN on Election Day in November.
  • What we have seen in the last decade is that in statewide elections in Georgia is that Democrats have been increasing their margins. They've been garnering more votes. They've been narrowing the gap between them and the Republican Party. So if they were going to continue on that trajectory, it was only a matter of time before Democrats were going to pass Republicans in terms of the vote. Winning the presidential election is only one data point, so I can't, I can't create a trend just yet with respect to that. What I suspect we're entering into is an era of increased competition where I'm expecting that we're going to continue to see very narrow margins between Democratic and Republican candidates in statewide elections, where Democrats win some elections and Republicans some elections.
  • Southern whites were a firm part of the New Deal coalition and that starts to change after the Civil Rights Movement. It didn't happen overnight. It took a long period of time. It culminated in the 2000s, at the beginning of the decade, with Sonny Perdue's gubernatorial victory and a change in party of the control in the state House of Representatives. And then it culminated by the 2010s at the end of the decade, when all of the statewide offices were won by Republican candidates.
  • We also have to credit the effort of both the Democratic Party and outside groups in reaching out to likely Democratic voters, getting them registered to vote and then getting them educated and mobilized so that they actually turn out to vote.
  • What we've seen happen in the last 20 years in the state is, one: the size of the African American vote makes up 30% of registered voters in the state. Given the fact that they are 90% Democratic in their voting behaviors, that means they make up the majority of Democratic voters in the state.But you can't win with 90% of 30% of the population, so you need a nontrivial number of White voters. And unlike neighboring states, Georgia is in a position where Democrats can get 30% of White voters.Georgia, unlike South Carolina or Alabama or Mississippi, has a very fast-growing Asian American and Hispanic population.While the Black electorate grew in the 2000s, the growth has been the most Asian American and Hispanic voters in the 2010s. They were 3% of all of registered voters in 2012, they were 6% of registered voters in this election cycle, and they also break Democratic. And if you get everybody to turn out to vote, you can put a winning electoral coalition together of African American, Asian American, Hispanic and liberal White voters.
  • Atlanta being a financial hub, a tech hub, a hub for the arts.
  • Atlanta is attracting well educated professional types of voters who are more Democratic in their orientation
  • In particular, Georgia is more Democratic now because it's got growing populations of color who are predisposed to be Democratic in orientation.This is not to say that 20 or 40 or 50 years from now that these populations are still going to be Democratic in orientation. A lot can change.
lmunch

Donna Brazile: GOP Senate candidates in Georgia are Trump puppets who act like contesta... - 0 views

  • The two U.S. Senate runoff elections that will be held in Georgia Tuesday will determine whether the Senate will work in partnership with President-elect Joe Biden to build a better future for Americans, or whether Republican obstructionists who put politics ahead of patriotism will be empowered to do everything possible to oppose our new president.
  • Recall that McConnell famously stated in 2010: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."So McConnell’s goal 10 years ago — in his own words — was not to serve the American people. Not to create jobs, improve health care, strengthen education, protect national security, or fight for equal rights. No, he admitted that his top priority was to do everything humanly possible to hurt President Obama’s reelection prospects, regardless of the harm inflicted on the American people. You can bet every penny you have that McConell feels the same way about our incoming president.
  • The demonization of this pastor who now preaches in Dr. King’s church is part of a long and disgraceful history in Georgia of hostility to its Black residents. In fact, Georgia has never elected a single Black U.S. senator, governor, lieutenant governor, or secretary of state. And yet the Census Bureau estimates that 32% of the state’s population is Black.
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  • Loeffler and Perdue were both against additional $2,000 COVID-19 economic stimulus checks before they were for the checks (but only after Trump’s belated tweet storm). They have both questioned the integrity of the November election and even demanded the resignation of a fellow Republican, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
leilamulveny

The National Guard's Role, Origins Explained - WSJ - 0 views

  • Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times.
  • Last year, in June, roughly 3,300 National Guard troops from 10 states deployed to Washington, D.C., during racial-justice protests. The National Guard dates back to before the declaration of U.S. independence, and its troops have deployed to locations as far flung as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Mexican border.
  • The National Guard was conceived at first as a citizen force to protect families and towns from hostile attacks, and its mission has since grown to encompass domestic emergencies, overseas combat missions, counternarcotics operations, and other duties.
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  • Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times.
  • Excluding the District of Columbia force, each National Guard group is under the control of its respective state or territorial governor. The D.C. National Guard operates under federal control at all times
  • National Guard units can be ordered into federal service, in which case control of the mobilized units passes from the respective governors to the president
  • tate governors can call branches of the National Guard into action during local or statewide emergencies, including natural disasters and civil disturbances. The president can activate the National Guard for participation in federal missions in the U.S. and abroad.
  • “homeland defense activities”
  • Presidents Trump, Obama and Bush deployed National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • ore than 250,000 people from the National Guard served in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan or Iraq
  • The National Guard has long participated in disaster-relief operations such as those following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and its troops provided security at airports around the country after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
anonymous

The Battle For The Senate Is About The Future Of American Politics | HuffPost - 0 views

  • The problem facing Democrats as they seek to win control of the Senate is a simple one: They need to win over a lot of voters in places like Labette to win control of Congress’ upper chamber, and even more of them to build a sustainable majority.
  • The disproportionate power granted to rural Americans ― who are far more likely to be old, white and conservative than other voters ― in the Senate is arguably the key fact of American political life
  • Rural areas’ disproportionate power is only set to grow in coming years, as more and more of the American population ― especially its most diverse and educated members ― settles in urban areas clustered in the union’s largest states.
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  • There are fewer and fewer senators that are from the opposite party of how their state voted for president
  • But the possibility that consecutive Democratic wave elections — ones in which the party has expanded its appeal to rural voters and working-class white voters — could deliver them only a narrow majority drives home the party’s disadvantage.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has issued a series of apocalyptic warnings. Democrats are threatening to “disfigure the Senate,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor.
  • “We are in a time where our nation needs to heal, not just from the COVID, but from this leadership that encourages divisiveness,”
  • Bollier, at times, can seem frustrated with rural voters’ focus on cultural issues.
  • Kander said Democratic candidates don’t need to run to the center or right to win in rural states, but that the party needs to do a better job of explaining why their policies will benefit rural communities
  • While Democrats have made all of these Republican-leaning states competitive, public surveys and internal polling from both parties indicates they’re not favored to win any of them.
  • “When election time comes, the focus seems to be on partisan hot-button issues rather than on the most important things — a job, health care, safety. It’s disappointing.”
  • The rural bias of the Senate has existed for a long time, though partisan shifts have meant it only started directly damaging Democrats recently
  • But it’s how the Senate discriminates against racial minorities that may force the hand of a party increasingly focused on racial injustices. The average Black voter has 16% less power in determining who controls the Senate than the average American.
  • he average Latino has 32% less power than the average American in determining who controls the Senate
  • The average white person? They have 13% more power.
  • And this tilt against racial minorities will only grow worse in the future: Even as demographers expect the country’s population to become majority people of color around the year 2050
  • National Republicans have attacked Democratic candidates who support ending the filibuster, accusing them of trying to “change the rules” to pass left-wing policies.
lmunch

Biden Will Nominate First Women to Lead Treasury and Intelligence, and First Latino to ... - 0 views

  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. plans to name Janet L. Yellen as Treasury secretary, a nomination that would put a woman in charge of the Treasury for the first time in its 231-year history.
  • In choosing Ms. Yellen, who was also the first woman to lead the Federal Reserve, Mr. Biden is turning to a renowned labor economist at a moment of high unemployment, when millions of Americans remain out of work and the economy continues to struggle from the coronavirus.
  • Ms. Yellen, 74, is likely to bring a long-held preference for government help for households that are struggling economically. But she will be thrust into negotiating for more aid with what is expected to be a divided Congress, pushing her into a far more political role than the one she played at the independent central bank.
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  • They share a belief in the core principles of the Democratic foreign policy establishment: international cooperation, strong U.S. alliances and leadership, but a wariness of foreign interventions after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • The racial and gender mix of the expected nominees also reflects Mr. Biden’s stated commitment to diversity, which has lagged notoriously in the worlds of foreign policy and national security.
  • Mr. Kerry’s job does not require Senate confirmation. A statement released by the transition office said Mr. Kerry “will fight climate change full time as special presidential envoy for climate and will sit on the National Security Council.”
  • To manage his domestic climate policies, Mr. Biden will also soon name a White House climate director, who will have equal standing with Mr. Kerry, according to transition officials.
  • Top immigration officials in the Obama administration recommended Mr. Mayorkas’s nomination as a way to build support with the immigrant community while satisfying moderates and career officials within the agency who are looking for a leader with a background in law enforcement.
  • If confirmed, Ms. Haines will be the highest-ranking woman to serve in the intelligence community. The director of the C.I.A. — now led by its first female director, Gina Haspel — reports to the director of national intelligence.
  • Perhaps the biggest surprise was Mr. Biden’s decision to bring back Mr. Kerry in a new role that would signal the administration’s commitment to fighting climate change.
  • “We have no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy,” Mr. Biden said in a statement provided by his transition office. “I need a team ready on Day 1 to help me reclaim America’s seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face and advance our security, prosperity and values. This is the crux of that team.”
  • Mr. Blinken is widely viewed as a pragmatic centrist on foreign policy who, like Mr. Biden, has supported past American interventions and believes the United States must play a central leadership role in the world. Mr. Biden most likely calculated that the soft-spoken Mr. Blinken, who is well regarded by many Republicans, will face a less difficult Senate confirmation fight than another top contender, the former national security adviser Susan E. Rice
  • But it may have cleared the way for Ms. Yellen — who became an economist at a time when few women entered or rose in the male-dominated field — to break yet another public policy glass ceiling.
Javier E

Opinion | White Supremacy Was Her World. And Then She Left. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Many white Americans are quick to distinguish between everyday prejudice and radical bigotry, but it’s a false distinction. White nationalists make explicit ideas that are already coded or veiled in the wider white imagination. Hate is what many people would see if they looked in a fun-house mirror: a distorted but still recognizable reflection.
  • It is important to acknowledge this ugly truth if we hope to understand events now unfolding across the country.
  • There are questions about whether white lip service will translate into sustained anti-racist action, and about what the same people who condemn unlawful killings of Black Americans might have to say about less violent manifestations of racism, ones that benefit them
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  • There is also the inevitability of backlash: History shows that there are always people who turn to hate in the very moments that others find hope.
  • We know little about how to combat hate effectively; the federal government has cut funding for programs to counter right-wing extremism and blocked the dissemination of data on the subject
  • Ms. Olsen had never thought too hard about being white. Like many white Americans, she never had to. She grew up in a largely white school district in Eugene, Ore., and she did not interact meaningfully with people of other races until her late 20s, when she moved to Portland for her embalming career. She had paid such little mind to race as a concept that there was a flatness to her understanding of it, a one-dimensionality susceptible to simplified reasoning.
  • To Ms. Olsen, these people seemed smart. Just as important, she told me, “they seemed immensely interested in me and my life, and they wanted to be my friend.” To someone who “grew up without friends, that was very appealing. It made me feel like I must be doing something right.”
  • Then came the election of President Barack Obama. “Right-wing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool,” a Homeland Security report noted in 2009. The first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Stormfront registered nearly 100,000 new users.
  • The most basic definition of hate is personal animus, but there is a more useful, and frightening, description: Hate is a social bond — a shared currency — and it abhors a vacuum
  • “social camaraderie, a desire for simple answers to complex political problems, or even the opportunity to take action against formidable social forces can coexist with, even substitute for, hatred as the reason for participation in organized racist activities.”
  • So can a need for validation, visibility and purpose. For someone like Ms. Olsen, hate becomes a cure for loneliness.
  • People who are drawn to the hate movement have an acute desire to make sense of their place in the world. There’s a gap between who they are and who they think they should be, what they have and what they want. They want to seize or regain what they believe is a rightful status. They want empowerment, with minimal effort. Hate promises them that.
  • White Citizens’ Councils and other organs of resistance emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement. Hate fed on opposition to second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics.
  • She wasn’t always sure that she believed what she said when she echoed her new friends’ views, but what mattered was that they wanted to keep talking to her; all she had to do was log in and start typing. If playing a part graduated to instinct, maybe they would like her even more.
  • Ms. Olsen was part of this wave, which also found fuel in the xenophobia of the post-Sept. 11 era and public disgust with the financial crisis.
  • Many people rationalize their racism — or even refuse to call it that — by insisting that it isn’t as bad as someone else’s. They could spit on immigrants instead of complaining in private about foreigners stealing American jobs. They could put Jewish people in camps instead of muttering about how they have too much power.
  • Bigotry has many branches, some bigger and stronger than others, but they all derive from the same trunk. No wonder, then, that when “somebody said he didn’t like Black people, or he told a racist joke, or he said illegal immigration is wrong,” Ms. Olsen recalled, she assumed he might be interested in becoming a neo-Nazi, too.
  • n her telling, Ms. Olsen decided to leave the hate movement because she realized that she could not tolerate violence. That may have been part of it, but when I spoke to her, it was clear that she also exited because the movement stopped giving her the meaning and camaraderie she wanted.
  • People don’t leave the hate movement because a veil lifts and they are suddenly able to see hate for what it is. The truth is more disappointing. They leave because it makes sense to them and for them, because the value hate once gave them has diminished or evaporated. Ms. Olsen seemed to know this, writing once on a blog, “The reality is, people rarely change their personality or ideals during adulthood, and if they do, it needs to be something they do on their own, for themselves.”
  • Some prominent white supremacists now point to the birth of Black Lives Matter as a pivotal moment in their radicalization
  • Perhaps more people than ever will emerge from 2020 on the side of justice. Still, there are those who will turn to hate, finding it — perversely — to be a kind of balm.
  • Research shows that a shared sense of racial identity is hardening among white Americans. The political scientist Ashley Jardina has found that some 20 percent of white Americans, roughly 40 million people, now have “strong levels of group consciousness,” meaning they “feel a sense of discontent over the status of their group.”
  • Having group consciousness does not automatically translate into prejudice, but the hate movement is poised to exploit white people’s grievances and fears.
  • What can we do to stop it? There aren’t easy answers.
  • while reporting on the hate movement, I found it difficult not to feel despondent. Magnifying my gloom were encounters with white liberals who made statements that I recognized as precisely the kind of bait white nationalists use to make their case to the mainstream.
  • The least Americans can ask of one another is to have frank conversations about whiteness, no matter how uncomfortable.
  • People concerned about the tide of hate can also work to empower minority populations, tackle inequality, foster dialogue about prejudice and root discriminatory ideas out of American life. They can vote bigots out of office. They can support the work of groups like Life After Hate, which helps people leave far-right groups.
  • First, though, combating hate requires understanding it. Not what it seems to be, but what it actually is. That includes who embraces it, and why.
  • So much of history is made up of small moves. Hope, too, dwells in increments. There is hope if white Americans can confront the true face of hate and their own complicity in bigotry. There is hope if we can see white nationalism as a crisis of individual and collective responsibility.
martinelligi

'You Would Do the Same': Graham Is Defiant on Supreme Court Reversal - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But less than 24 hours after that hypothetical became a reality with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, Mr. Graham, now the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, made a complete and brazen reversal. He promised that he would push forward immediately to confirm President Trump’s pick — seemingly unbothered by the obvious conflict between his position four years ago and his stance now.“I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot,” Mr. Graham wrote Monday to Democrats on the judiciary panel, “you would do the same.”
  • , as dozens of senators who held together in 2016 to prevent Mr. Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat now rush to deliver the current president his choice to replace Justice Ginsburg.
  • In the letter to Democrats on Monday, Mr. Graham offered another reason for his new stance, describing it as a matter of fairness to voters, because, “unlike in 2016, President Trump is currently standing for re-election: The people will have a say in his choices.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Worst Is Yet to Come - The New York Times - 0 views

  • we should spend more time considering the real possibility that every problem we face will get much worse than we ever imagined. The coronavirus is like a heat-seeking missile designed to frustrate progress in almost every corner of society, from politics to the economy to the environment.
  • It is all these things and something more fundamental: a startling lack of leadership on identifying the worst consequences of this crisis and marshaling a united front against them. Indeed, division and chaos might now be the permanent order of the day.
  • In a book published more than a decade ago, I argued that the internet might lead to a choose-your-own-facts world in which different segments of society believe in different versions of reality. The Trump era, and now the coronavirus, has confirmed this grim prediction.
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  • That’s because the pandemic actually has created different political realities. The coronavirus has hit dense, racially diverse Democratic urban strongholds like New York much harder than sparsely populated rural areas, which lean strongly to the G.O.P.
  • That divergent impact — with help from the president and his acolytes — is feeding a dangerous partisan split about the nature of the virus itself.
  • The virus’s economic effects will only create further inequality and division. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other behemoths will not only survive, they look poised to emerge stronger than ever.
  • Worst of all, it’s possible that the pain of this crisis might not fully register in broad economic indicators , especially if, as happened after the 2008 recession, we see a long, slow recovery that benefits mainly the wealthy.
  • : The virus-induced recession could further destroy the news industry and dramatically reduce the number of working journalists in the country, our last defense against misinformation.
  • activists have lately been finding success in pushing to build more housing in restrictive regions like the San Francisco Bay Area. The virus may put such reforms on ice
  • consider the grim future of public transportation after the pandemic: Will people just get back in their cars, driving everywhere they go?
  • the United States has failed to make the best of our most recent national calamities. The 9/11 attacks pushed us into needless quagmires in the Middle East. The 2008 recession deepened inequality.
lmunch

A Biden Win Could Renew a Democratic Split on Trade - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office. But as the campaign nears an end, a deep split between progressives and moderate Democrats on trade policy is once again spilling out into the open.
  • Many of Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are holdovers from the Obama administration, who, like Mr. Biden, believe deeply in the benefits of global economic integration.
  • “During the campaign, you can kind of gloss over it, you can make statements in vague ways, but at a certain point you have to make decisions about personnel and about policy,” Mr. Lester said.
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  • The split is falling along familiar lines between moderates — who see trade agreements as key to American peace and prosperity — and left-wing Democrats, who blame trade deals for hurting American workers in favor of corporate interests.
  • His vice-presidential pick, Senator Kamala Harris of California, has also taken a more skeptical stance on trade and was one of the few Senate Democrats to vote against the revised NAFTA agreement because it did not contain provisions on climate change.
  • Top officials in the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the National Security Council, could have outsized influence over the direction of relations with China given the growing concerns among both Democrats and Republicans about Beijing’s economic, military and technology ambitions.
ethanshilling

How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

  • As the planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture.
  • A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm;
  • Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter.
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  • Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.
  • But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate.
  • And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation.
  • There is an optimum climate for human productivity — average annual temperatures between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — and much of the planet’s far north is headed straight toward it.
  • And as the climate warms, Canada will move into the ecological sweet spot for civilization, benefiting from new Arctic transportation routes as well as an expanded capacity for farming.
  • As Vladimir Putin himself once glibly put it, a couple of degrees of warming might not be so bad: “We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”
  • The race for prosperity in a climate-changed world is about achieving domestic self-reliance and also expanding geopolitical influence.
  • but Tchebakova’s research suggests that if humans continue to emit carbon dioxide at high rates, roughly half of Siberia — more than two million square miles — could become available for farming by 2080, and its capacity to support potential climate migrants could jump ninefold in some places as a result.
  • The wait may not be especially long. This season, crops of winter wheat and canola seed outside Tchebakova’s own city of Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia produced twice the yields as the year before.
  • This is why a group of Canadian business executives and academics have called on their government to turn the country’s immigration system into a magnet for the planet’s most talented people, hoping to nearly triple Canada’s population by 2100.
  • But agriculture offers the key to one of the greatest resources of the new climate era — food — and in recent years Russia has already shown a new understanding of how to leverage its increasingly strong hand in agricultural exports
  • Russia’s agricultural dominance, says Rod Schoonover, the former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and a former senior State Department analyst under the Obama and Trump administrations, is “an emergent national security issue” that is “underappreciated as a geopolitical threat.”
  • In 2010, in what was a rare and early official assessment of climate risk, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review warned that climate change “could have significant geopolitical impacts,” contributing to poverty, starvation, drought and the spread of disease
  • The current plan invites any Russians willing to relocate themselves in Siberia and the Far East, including in the Birobidzhan area of the Jewish Autonomous Region, to buy properties at 2 percent interest.
sidneybelleroche

Breyer's retirement preempts more Supreme Court hardball from McConnell - 0 views

  • While many Democratic activists may regard Mitch McConnell as an all-powerful bogeyman, there is little that the Republican Senate minority leader from Kentucky can do to stop President Biden from nominating the next Supreme Court justice.
  • While many Democratic activists may regard Mitch McConnell as an all-powerful bogeyman, there is little that the Republican Senate minority leader from Kentucky can do to stop President Biden from nominating the next Supreme Court justice.
  • Republicans hope to take back the Senate majority in the midterm elections this fall, and McConnell had already signaled last summer that if that were to happen, he would likely block any attempt by Biden to nominate a justice to an open Supreme Court seat.
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  • Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement comes none too soon for Democrats.
  • McConnell’s position does not have precedent, despite his claim to be an institutionalist.
  • But as long as Democrats have the majority in the Senate, Biden can nominate justices to the Supreme Court. That’s because McConnell abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017, in order to appoint Neil Gorsuch to the bench.
  • When Scalia, a conservative justice, died almost six years ago, McConnell — who controlled the Senate at that time as majority leader — moved with lightning speed. Within an hour, he issued a statement saying he would not even allow a hearing for any nominee put forward by then-President Barack Obama.
  • Under McConnell’s rationale for blocking the Garland nomination in 2016, he would have left the seat open and allowed “the American people” to “have a voice in the selection.
  • nstead, McConnell reversed himself. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” he said. The confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett moved the court solidly to the right, giving conservatives a 6-3 majority in some cases and a 5-4 majority even in cases in which Chief Justice John Roberts did not rule their way.
  • I
  • His retirement now, rather than a year from now, will prevent conservatives from dominating the court even more than they already do. And it may end up being the only Supreme Court vacancy filled by Biden.
lilyrashkind

Presidential approval tracker: How popular is Joe Biden? - 0 views

  • Joe Biden’s presidency has been dominated by historic challenges — a resurgent Covid pandemic, an uncertain economy and the American military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
  • But how will these events affect his approval rating?
  • Bookmark this page to see if Biden’s approval rating will follow suit. The chart below shows his approval rating history, along with those of former Presidents Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Javier E

Ukraine War Ushers In 'New Era' for Biden and U.S. Abroad - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “It feels like we’re definitively in a new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.”
  • The attack by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his neighbor has become a prism through which nearly all American foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and officials said.
  • In the near term, Russia’s aggression is sure to invigorate Mr. Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like Moscow
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  • Yet three increasingly authoritarian NATO nations — Poland, Hungary and Turkey — play key roles in the coalition aiding Kyiv. And the United States is grappling with internal assaults to its own democracy.
  • The war lends urgency to Mr. Biden’s climate change agenda, reinforcing the need for more reliance on renewable clean energy over the fossil fuels that fill Russian coffers.
  • Yet it has already generated new pressure to increase the short-term supply of oil from the likes of Venezuela’s isolated dictatorship and Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian monarchy.
  • While some experts warn that a renewed focus on Europe will inevitably divert attention from Asia, several top White House officials say the United States can capitalize on how the war has convinced some Asian governments that they need to work more closely with the West to build up a global ideological front to defend democracy.
  • “What we are seeing now is an unprecedented level of Asian interest and focus,”
  • “And I believe one of the outcomes of this tragedy will be a kind of new thinking around how to solidify institutional connections beyond what we’ve already seen between Europe and the Pacific,”
  • Mr. Biden sought to rebuild American alliances, but did so largely in the name of confronting China.
  • The Russian invasion has expanded his mission dramatically and urgently, setting the stage for a seismic geopolitical shift that would pit the United States and its allies against China and Russia at once if they form an entrenched anti-Western bloc
  • “We’ve been trying to get to a new era for a long time,” he said. “And now I think Putin’s invasion has necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”
  • Saudi Arabia has declined so far to increase oil production, while the United Arab Emirates waited until Wednesday to ask the OPEC nations to do so. American officials were also furious with the U.A.E. for declining to vote on a United Nations Security Council resolution to condemn Russia, though it did support a similar resolution later in the U.N. General Assembly.
  • The unreliability of the two nations and Russia’s place in the oil economy have increased momentum within the Biden administration to enact policies that would help the United States more quickly wean itself off fossil fuels and confront the climate crisis.
  • “We may see more fundamental questioning about the value of these partnerships,” Ms. Kaye said. “These states already believe the U.S. has checked out of the region, but their stance on Russia may only strengthen voices calling for a further reduction of U.S. forces in the region.”
  • “In times of crisis, there is sometimes a tension between our values and our interests,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “In the short term, we’re going to have to prioritize pushing back against Russia, at the risk of taking our foot off the gas on the democracy and human rights concerns that had been at the front and center of the Biden administration’s agenda.”
Javier E

Opinion | Why Barbie and Ken Need Each Other - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2010s, in their responses to the General Social Survey, American women reported themselves to be steadily unhappier. The trend was not drastic, but it was consistent: Women were less happy in the 1980s than they were in the 1970s, less happy in the Obama era than the Clinton era, and still less happy under Trump.
  • For men, the trend was more complex. They started out slightly unhappier than women and then made gains in the Reagan and Clinton years, while female happiness declined. But then male unhappiness plunged between the 9/11 era and Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, before stabilizing a bit thereafter. By the pre-Covid period, the sexes were close to parity — sharing more reported unhappiness than either had been experiencing 30 or 40 years before.
  • These figures are drawn out of a fascinating new paper, “The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” from the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman
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  • a different trend covered in the Peltzman paper: the persistent happiness advantage enjoyed by married couples over the unmarried, which has slightly widened since the early 1970s and now sits at around 35 points on a scale running from -100 to 100.
  • Over that same period, Americans have become much less likely to be married overall. In 1970, just 9 percent of people ages 25 to 50 had never tied the knot; in 2018, it was 35 percent.
  • the simplest possible explanation for declining happiness: For women maybe first, and for men too, eventually, less wedlock means more woe.
  • Barbieland itself is a female-first utopia that looks fundamentally dystopian — plastic, denatured, death-denying, cut off from love and procreation. The way that Barbiedom marginalizes images of pregnancy and motherhood, to say nothing of literal baby dolls, is a running preoccupation of the film
  • Is the Greta Gerwig movie proudly feminist, crypto-conservative or somewhere in between?
  • The simplest reading is the feminist one. The movie depicts a dolltopia where Barbies occupy every important job and office (with their Kens as arm candy) and tell themselves that their example has solved all of women’s problems in the real world, too — only to discover, when Margot Robbie’s “stereotypical Barbie” goes on a quest into our own contemporary reality, that sexism still exists, the patriarchy is disguised but maybe still resilient, the board of Mattel is proudly “feminist” but all male, and early 21st-century women are being asked to do it all for meager recompense.
  • Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire claims, “conservative, anti-feminist, pro-family, pro-motherhood” themes
  • In part, the conservative spin comes from the sheer fun of Gosling’s performance
  • I want to talk about these findings in the light of the running debate about the true ideological perspective of the billion-dollar box-office juggernaut “Barbie.”
  • Ken’s plight is treated sympathetically — he’s mostly running his coup to impress Barbie, and what are men for in the post-sexual-revolution landscape, anyway?
  • Barbie’s own arc is away from the female-dominated dystopia and back toward embodied womanhood, the real world with all its patriarchal holdovers
  • “Barbie” is a movie with a feminist default, but also complicated and sometimes muddled feelings about what the sexual revolution has done and where feminism ought to go.
  • It’s against the resilient patriarchy, but wary of the girlboss alternative
  • It wants womanhood and motherhood, but it doesn’t want the Kens back in charge, and it doesn’t really know what purpose men should serve.
  • In each narrative, the one way that the current dissatisfactions of women and men can’t be resolved is with the happy ending that even stories about the battle of the sexes used to take for granted — not a rearrangement of political power but a romantic partnership, not one sex’s rule but both sexes’ contentment.
  • so the movie ends — again, spoiler — with Barbie out of Barbieland but on her own, seeking out some sort of reproductive destiny at the gynecologist with a mother-daughter cheerleading squad beside her and no Ken in sight.
  • There’s an interesting parallel to the ending of Lena Dunham’s series “Girls,”
  • A guy can literally organize a revolution and it still isn’t enough to make Barbie see him as a lover, a romantic partner, an erotic object, a husband or a father.
  • In the movie they made, “Barbie and Ken” is a statement of reverse subordination, female rule and male eclipse. But in reality, nothing may matter as much to male and female happiness, and indeed, to the future of the human race, as whether Barbie and Ken can make that “and” into something reciprocal and fertile — a bridge, a bond, a marriage.
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